Hard to cover up a huge rocket launch. But still, much much easier than in the U.S., what with all the citizens walking around the launch sites in Florida and all those TV cameras and newspapers and everything.

Cover it up? The Soviets wouldn't cover that up. They threw people into space all the time. There are recordings of the damn audio of one of them burning up in orbit, and Yuri Gagarin was pretty open about it in the press.

Want to hear a Russian cosmonaut die because no one wanted to tell the boss the space ship was a heap of crap?

galahad05:Hard to cover up a huge rocket launch. But still, much much easier than in the U.S., what with all the citizens walking around the launch sites in Florida and all those TV cameras and newspapers and everything.

Not really. They covered up the N-1 explosion and their entire manned lunar program.

AverageAmericanGuy:Of course they did. Because the Reds are untrustworthy, scheming, liars.

Unlike our brave American heroes who are clad in righteousness and honor.

Actually, yeah. Sorry if it sounds too "America rah rah!" for you, but that's only a slightly-exaggerated account of how the space race went down. You should Google the audio recording of Yuri Gagarin, a genuine hero, as he burned to death on re-entry, cursing the incompetent, corrupt @ssholes who made him go up in a piece of shiat spacecraft.

shower_in_my_socks:AverageAmericanGuy: Of course they did. Because the Reds are untrustworthy, scheming, liars.

Unlike our brave American heroes who are clad in righteousness and honor.

Actually, yeah. Sorry if it sounds too "America rah rah!" for you, but that's only a slightly-exaggerated account of how the space race went down. You should Google the audio recording of Yuri Gagarin, a genuine hero, as he burned to death on re-entry, cursing the incompetent, corrupt @ssholes who made him go up in a piece of shiat spacecraft.

Gagarin wasn't the one that burned up. He was the backup pilot for that launch.

shower_in_my_socks:AverageAmericanGuy: Of course they did. Because the Reds are untrustworthy, scheming, liars.

Unlike our brave American heroes who are clad in righteousness and honor.

Actually, yeah. Sorry if it sounds too "America rah rah!" for you, but that's only a slightly-exaggerated account of how the space race went down. You should Google the audio recording of Yuri Gagarin, a genuine hero, as he burned to death on re-entry, cursing the incompetent, corrupt @ssholes who made him go up in a piece of shiat spacecraft.

shower_in_my_socks:. You should Google the audio recording of Yuri Gagarin, a genuine hero, as he burned to death on re-entry, cursing the incompetent, corrupt @ssholes who made him go up in a piece of shiat spacecraft.

shower_in_my_socks:AverageAmericanGuy: Of course they did. Because the Reds are untrustworthy, scheming, liars.

Unlike our brave American heroes who are clad in righteousness and honor.

Actually, yeah. Sorry if it sounds too "America rah rah!" for you, but that's only a slightly-exaggerated account of how the space race went down. You should Google the audio recording of Yuri Gagarin, a genuine hero, as he burned to death on re-entry, cursing the incompetent, corrupt @ssholes who made him go up in a piece of shiat spacecraft.

CORRECTION: It was Komarov who burned alive while cursing the Russian space organization.

Robert A. Heinlein wrote a story called "Pravda means 'Truth'" that detailed when he and his wife went to Russia. Heinlein's wife actually studied Russian for two years to the point where she could think in Russian. It helped with the tightly controlled tourist industry at the time. Sometimes, they could get away from their "guide" - when they did, they found that people were much more open.

Heinlein commented how he and Ginny met some Army cadets in a park. They were all very excited because the Soviet Union had launched a man into space! Heinlein felt saddened because the Americans were once again beat. The next day the story changed and it was claimed that there was no cosmonaut on that particular rocket, but a test dummy. Heinlein mentioned that her recalled hearing that there may have been some issues with that mission's retro-rockets and that the cosmonaut died in space.

The Russians have a history of "erasing" cosmonauts from pictures, just like they've done with other people. It surely didn't happen randomly.

machoprogrammer:While I wouldn't be shocked if it were true, almost every other secret about the Soviets has been leaked by now, so why wouldn't this be leaked?

Yeah, I'd think that if it actually happened, there would be more hard evidence than we currently have. Somebody who worked the pad or in launch control would have come out and said "Yes, we launched so and so, and he never came back alive, so they hushed it all up." Unless they were super-secretive about putting a man in the capsule there's just too many people who would have known there was one guy shot into space who was thereafter unaccounted for.